*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I’m honored this year to be the closing keynote speaker for DevLink 2011. I’ve been involved with DevLink in many ways over the past years and when John asked me to keynote, I couldn’t say no.

Now the fun part, coming up with something worthy enough to share with a broad audience.

I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for awhile about something I have wanted to share with developers. Really this has to do a lot with what I talk to someone about when I am mentoring/coaching them to grow as a person so they can do the surrounding parts of their job better.  What I mean by *surrounding* is sure we code and there are things we can do to make that better but there are other things we do as well like write emails, talk on the phone, and communicate/interact with human beings.

These points along with some others (I have some code examples as well) I want to discuss. For example, did you know developers have to be salesmen too? Many I have talked to find the thought of this repulsive but it is true. I learned this at an early age (even have a few stories about it) and I’ll explain why and how this is important.  

I don’t want to give the whole farm away so to speak but just know I’m working hard for everyone attending DevLink to really give you something to think about on your flight/drive back home.

Also, I’m doing a two day workshop before DevLink:

Two Day Workshop August 15th-16th, Chattanooga, TN – Introduction to .NET – .NET From Scratch

Can’t wait to see everyone!

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/keithelder

I just plugged my phone in to charge and was greeted with this lovely update.

Hooray!

I will be speaking at two .NET User Groups in Louisiana next week.

Greater New Orleans April 12th

The first place I’ll be speaking is on April 12th at the Greater New Orleans .NET User Group which meets in Metairie, LA. Here I will be doing a talk on Silverlight, RIA Services and Entity Framework.

Title

Building the Nullius Filius of Twitter and Facebook in Silverlight, RIA Services and Entity Framework

Abstract

Let’s imagine for a minute Twitter and Facebook had a passionate love affair and produced a child (nillius filius) named Johnny. Although Johnny was born from web-based parents there was a genetic defect that caused Johnny to be born a Rich Internet Application (RIA). In this talk we are going to look at the lessons, trials, tribulations and successes Johnny had growing up being a Rich Internet Application. We’ll take a look at the journey of building a REAL Silverlight application  (Johnny) for the enterprise (not some simple demo) and talk about the pain, the joy and lessons learned. Hopefully we’ll answer the question: “Is Johnny happy with himself or does he wishes he was born from different parents so he wasn’t a RIA.”

Hammond .NET User Group April 13th

On Wednesday I’ll be speaking at the Southeastern Louisiana University campus for the Hammond .NET User Group. Since this group is mostly students I thought the best thing to do was an intro class to get everyone up to speed about .NET. After that I’ll do a Q&A and we’ll see where that leads us.

Title

Back to the Basics: What is .Net?

Abstract

No other name in history has confused more people on the planet than when Microsoft named their development platform .NET. For a lot of developers .NET remains a mystery and it is often confused with many things. This session goes back to the basics and is a primer for anyone that is starting at ground zero with .Net. In this session we’ll look at what .Net really is, the benefits of the platform, bust a few myths and show some sound reasons why you should consider it as a platform and look at lots of demos. At the end of the session, hopefully we’ll answer one of life’s most puzzling questions: What is .NET?

http://tinyurl.com/deepfried67

In this episode we sit down with Michael Eaton, an independent software consultant for over ten years, to help others thinking about becoming an independent software consultant. Michael provides tons of tips including how to manage money, what to charge clients, how much to save for taxes, health insurance, accounting, time tracking tools and tons of other great tips.

Thanks to our guest this episode

Michael is a software developer primarily interested in developing solutions for clients using Microsoft tools and technologies He is a  strong believer in Test Driven Design, Continuous Integration and incremental delivery to ensure customers get high-quality and robust solutions that work for them. Michael’s blog is at http://mjeaton.net/blog  Michael can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mjeaton Michael can be found on LinkedIn at http://linkedin.com/in/mjeaton

Show Notes

• AgileZen – managing tasks with clients
• Harvest – time tracking and invoicing
• Outright – accounting made simple (big picture view of the business)
• Tripit – tracking travel and trips
• ShoeBoxed – tracking expenses
• Evernote – notes (although Michael uses pen and paper still)

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http://tinyurl.com/deepfried66

In this episode, we sit down with Gary Short of DevExpress to talk about Technical Debt, the cost of putting off good development practices, and how it can cripple a project’s velocity, flexibility, and quality.

Thanks to our guest this episode

Gary Short works for Developer Express as the Technical Evangelist on the frameworks team. He has a deep interest in technical architecture, especially in the areas of technical debt and refactoring. Gary is a C# MVP and gives presentations at user groups and conferences throughout the UK. As well as C#, Gary also has an interest in dynamic languages such as Smalltalk, Ruby and Python as well as iPhone development using Objective-C.

Gary’s blog is at http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/garyshort

Gary can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/garyshort

Show Notes

• Blog post defining it on Gary’s blog

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